MUBI

MUBI is a video-on-demand subscription service that provides users with access to cult, classic, independent and award-winning movies. Novoda helped Mubi create a unique cross-platform user experience worthy of their exceptional content.

Our software and media expertise helped them solve the challenging technical requirements that come with streaming video across multiple devices.

Vital Statistics

A single cross-platform APK

3 platforms: phone, tablet and TV

5 people on project team

100,000+ downloads

The brief

Mubi were new to the world of mobile when we started working together in 2014. Their main goal was to reach out to Android users across their wide variety of devices with a seamless brand experience.

Key elements we had to deliver were:

High quality product to suit a discerning audience

Consistent viewing experience across all devices

In-app purchases across all platforms to enable subscriptions

Integration with Google Cast

Key features

We decided to progress with the single APK format, enabling one app to work across multiple platforms rather than building separate apps for each. This enabled us to roll out across Android, Fire OS and Android TV formats - and the more than 50 million devices that use them - with one app. Mubi was also one of the first applications to feature Google Cast integration, bringing Mubi’s content to TVs across the nation through Google Chromecasts.

We designed the app to download media and sync viewing information automatically across all Android devices once the user is logged in to their Google account. It also syncs to store their position within any movie they’re watching so they can pick it up in the same spot on another device.

We also added a few visual features to bring a little extra delight to users’ experience of the app. The posters from users’ favourite films rotate elegantly across the screen through the ‘Daydream’ screensaver and the ‘Muzei’ feature enables rotating background images. We also created an image cropping tool that provides easy cropping of images around the key focal point to suit any screen size.

The end result

The finished product delivered a best-in-class smart TV experience. Even Google took notice of the unrivalled multi-device experience and featured the Mubi app on the Play Store many times.

As the app was considered to be of such a high standard, MUBI was chosen to be pre-installed on all Amazon Fire TV Sticks and Android TV Nexus Players that were shipped in the UK.

Since its release the app has gone from strength to strength around the world with more than 100,000 downloads and counting.

Read more on our blog

Get a more in-depth technical view on the strategies, development process and features of the MUBI project on our blog.

by Daniele Bonaldo

Improve your cast

Learn about the enhancements we made for optimising the MUBI Chromecast experience.